2004-09-19 04:00:00 PDT New York -- Liza Normal, the aspiring pop star protagonist of "Colors Insulting to Nature," Cintra Wilson's new novel, supports herself penning cult fiction about a dominatrix heroine named Val de Minus. The joke of the book is that Liza's writing, which she considers "time consuming, libido-warping" and "pathetic," is what wins her (or at least her alter ego, Val) the fame she craves.

The larger-than-life Wilson, Liza's creator, is an equally reluctant convert to the literary lifestyle. Her business card advertises "verbal swashbuckling, public tantrums & other cultural abuse," omitting any mention of writing. But over the past decade, Wilson's prose has won her a following to rival Liza's, first through her San Francisco Examiner column "Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain," for which she channeled the persona of a sort of tongue-in-cheek post-modern Ann Landers, then through her Salon.com column, where she dissected celebrity antics and her own colorful life. (Many of these columns were included in her recent essay collection: "A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease.")

"Colors Insulting to Nature" picks up where the book left off, both in subject matter (the twisted nature of our collective obsession with celebrity) and tone (smart, sharp, and wicked). It also establishes her as a legitimate novelist, able to balance plot and character development with archly insightful cultural criticism. But Wilson still struggles with the solitary nature of the literary life.

"I really didn't want to write," she says over brunch at a bistro in her Park Slope, Brooklyn, neighborhood. "It was the last thing I wanted to do. Writing's gloryless and lonely and miserable, and I'm very social. I wanted to work with people. I liked collaborating, I was a theater person."

And still is, as evidenced by the traces of glitter on her neck and collarbone, remainders of the ensemble she wore to her book launch party the night before in Manhattan's meatpacking district. (Along with what she describes as a "bejeweled banquet dress from British Hong Kong," and Lucite heels, Wilson's outfit included homemade silver antlers, a nod to "Colors' " recurrent motif of a golden stag. Hence the glitter.) Relatively demure this morning in a black T-shirt, jeans and gold boots, Wilson still exudes theatricality as she talks, tossing her hair and gesturing expansively.

The theater was where Wilson, a native of Marin County, got her start. Her first play, "Juvee," based on her experiences in juvenile hall, was produced when she was 19. She soon became a fixture on the Bay Area underground theater circuit, performing in venues like Climate Theater, Club Nine and Club Foot.

Even when she wasn't onstage, Wilson created drama wherever she went. "I was one of those club kids who got dressed for three hours a night," she says. "I would wear a rubber bathing cap, black stockings and a jockstrap, a tight striped swimsuit and people would carry me through the club and I would kick and swim all night -- I was 16 or something, it was great."

Liza treads many of the same Bay Area paths Wilson did. She performs in amateur theater in Fairfax (a homespun, unintentionally high-camp production of "The Sound of Music" is one of the book's comic high points), haunts the Marin City flea market and explores San Francisco's punk scene while attending a fictionalized version of Tamalpais High. The school is depicted as a dumping ground for the morally corrupt, precociously debauched children of degenerate Marin parents.

"Everyone's parents were so f -- up in Marin," Wilson says of her own years at Tam High. "They were Mercedes-driving, coke-sniffing, other parent-f - - , hot-tub-dwelling nightmares. You had kids who were very sophisticated because their parents were living like idiots."

Early turning point

One of the novel's early turning points comes when Liza gets drunk at a high school party and loses her virginity in a utility closet, after which the boy partially shaves her head. Wilson performs the scene at her readings for "Colors," complete with voices and long, knowing looks at the audience as she describes Liza downing shots of Triple Sec and Kahlua on the way to her undoing. Her delivery elicits laughs and groans of recognition from the audience at the reading, but Wilson has gotten a different reaction from others. "This is the book for the girl who was singled out and reviled in high school, which is all of them," she says. "Everyone has that experience to some degree, but a lot of girls aren't ready to laugh about it." She cites one reviewer who said her book "abuses" readers by making them relive high school humiliations. Even some of Wilson's friends called "Colors" a "cringefest."

"I wanted to channel the deeply humiliating, cringing things that make you wake up in the middle of the night and go, 'How could I have been so stupid?' and turn it into something funny," she says. "It's a lame and sleazy process trying to become human, and that's OK."

After dropping out of high school, Wilson went to San Francisco State, where she supported herself writing, and occasionally recording, scripts for 976 phone sex services, an experience she files in the "lame and sleazy" drawer. But the scripts paid her tuition, and later paid off as inspiration for Liza's Val de Minus work. They may also be the root of Wilson's lasting ambivalence about the literary profession. "Everybody's very impressed and they shouldn't be; it was really lame," she says of her stint as a very young pornographer. "It was just labor. I was sitting there in a typing room at S.F. State writing, 'Ooooh, harder,' and I just hated it. But it gave me a good work ethic when it came to writing. They say in meditation you just need good sitting muscles. For writing you just need good typing muscles. I don't call it writing. I call it typing. It's just sitting there typing."

Wilson's next "typing" job was for Frisko magazine, where she met Gary Kamiya, one of the editors there, who subsequently led her to the Examiner and later to Salon.com. In 1996, Wilson moved from San Francisco to New York. Shortly after her move her ex-boyfriend, Bay Area musician Kevin Gilbert, was found dead in his apartment of autoerotic asphyxiation. The little-known phenomenon occurs when a person accidentally suffocates while cutting off his own air supply while masturbating, and is often confused with suicide. "AEA," as Wilson, who has done extensive research, calls it, makes an appearance in "Colors" as well, the unfortunate fate of a sadomasochistic gay dwarf Liza befriends.

Gilbert was not the first person Wilson lost to AEA -- her best friend's boyfriend in high school, also a musician, died of it as well. "Two people in my life have died of AEA, and nobody knows about it," she says. "So I was trying to raise awareness about that. I was hoping people would ask questions about it. It's been a big thing in my life."

Around the time Gilbert died, Wilson was having what she calls "strange aboriginal dream visions" -- she interrupts herself to confess "I know, I sound crazy already" -- which led her to become an initiate in the practice of Santeria.

"I was in the middle of some very intense Santeria ceremonies when Kevin died -- Kevin died, I got the news and I had a Santeria ceremony the next day," she says, explaining that she went through a period of dressing all in white as a means of protecting herself. (Liza, too, goes through an all-white phase, peroxiding her hair and pairing a nurse's uniform with white fishnets and heels.) Wilson still occasionally dresses all in white, and has a small Santeria shrine set up in her home. She calls the practice "externalized mediation," likening the rituals to an "emergency room for your spiritual practice. If you rupture your spiritual spleen, you go to Santeria," she says.

'New Age' hoodoo

If all this makes Wilson sound like just the sort of Northern California nut job she so exquisitely skewers in "Colors," she's fine with that, admitting she sometimes misses the "New Age hoodoo" of the West Coast, though she plans on staying in New York for the foreseeable future. She's less OK with detractors who assert she writes so cuttingly about celebrity because of her own secret desire for fame. She takes special exception with one critic who savaged her first book, neglecting to mention that the anti-celebrity rants were supposed to be satiric. Beneath the costumes and the drama, the esoteric religions and hyperbolic self-advertisements, Wilson is actually disarmingly down to earth. She has the sort of bemused awareness of her own foibles that Liza so desperately lacks, and is genuinely warm, remarkably candid. This mix of diva and dork is evident during a photo shoot after the interview, when she pauses in the middle of directing the photographer on how to capture her good side to ask him about his tattoo. Within minutes she has him talking about the Holocaust, Sept. 11 and a loved one's battle with ovarian cancer. She listens to him with fierce empathy.

After the shoot, Wilson rehearses for her reading. As proof that old habits die hard, she has memorized the entire scene and is working with a director to turn the event into more of a spoken-word performance piece. The antlers will not be in evidence, but Wilson still intends to put on a show.